Tuesday, 31 January 2017

In the beginning Men were merely primordial selves immersed in the ocean of universal consciousness; and the history of everything has included the progressive and incremental separation of these selves from the universal primary reality.

We began as immersed in universal reality - joined with everything, and everything joined with us - with permeable selves... We end with a Self that is aware of its own separation from things, from other people, from memories - and even from its own thoughts...

Why? Because separation is necessary for freedom, for agency; we must first be separate in order to be free. And free in order, ultimately, to share the divine status of the Creator - because God is free.

*

This separation of the self can physically be be imagined as a process of precipitation - of solid bodies coming from gaseous spirits.

Or as a biological analogy; as development. A baby lives at first in the ocean of amniotic fluid, inside the mother; and only gradually, incrementally, does the baby's self become separate from the mother's self - first by birth, then by development and increasing independence... but only in adolescence does the child at some point become existentially separate - an agent.

And once reached, and attained, that cannot be undone - he can get stuck in adolescence, or move on to adulthood; but he cannot return to childhood. Consciousness, separation, can temporarily be obliterated by disease, or intoxication - or suspended during sleep - but is essentially permanent.

(Incarnation is an example. When we became embodied, we could not return to the spiritual state; the preceding spiritual being could not be restored - because our selves are in our bodies, and if the body is then subtracted, what remains is not what there was before. Therefore after death the only alternatives are resurrection - with a renewed body - or else a fundamental change of the spiritual self with loss and distortion.)

*

So we begin by participating in the whole of reality - that was given. But our selves were only feebly independent, and not sufficiently separate that we could be free agents. Then a process began in the history of the human race, which is recapitulated in individuals - we developed agency by separation of the self from everything else.

At some moment the self is cut-off from everything else - and therefore unfree, because isolated. So there is a step beyond, which is a return to participation with universal reality.

Universal reality is always there - that is, everywhere - we used to be in reality but the future, the destiny, is that we should think reality.

The self now needs to - voluntarily and by an effort - engage with universal reality in a free relationship; knowing that this is happening.

The task or destiny is to re-engage with universal reality - which is everywhere for everybody, as it always has been, in a deliberate, explicit, way. This is not a matter of 'thinking about' universal reality - it is a matter of thinking-universal-reality; in other words, by thinking to become part of it.

*

But universal reality is everything - does this mean we can know everything? Not exactly and not in practice.

It does mean that there are not ultimate limits to knowledge - excepting other selves, which lie outside the system. But in practice we must navigate through this unbounded and vast world of universal reality - and for our experience to lead to valid knowledge, we ourselves must be Good and the experience we encounter to be undeceptive.

In practice, we navigate universal reality with love. It is love which leads us to the people (and entities) we can learn from; it is love which leads us to the truth rather than the falsehoods and misleadings, the evil entities, which also lie within universal reality.

Love is the cohesion and structure of everything in God's creation. And love is our safe-guard against the possibilities that would emerge is we were motivated by power, or even merely by 'curiosity'.

Imagine yourself as a self, guided by love, navigating the ocean of universal reality! That is the possibility. It is love which guides us to our Heavenly families and which guides them to us; it is love which guides the great composer to the beautiful music with universal meaning; it is love which guides the real scientist to the intuitive truths about reality...

*

So participation is given, knowledge is given... but what must be achieved is the autonomy of our-selves; and having been achieved the destiny is to return to participation; to take it up again but not to be inside it, but outside of it while yet part of it.

In a sense, with Final Participation, the vast world of universal reality is experienced as 'within us' - within our thinking. Instead us us being immersed in the ocean - the ocean is, somehow, in our own thoughts! And therefore we engage with the ocean from a place outside the ocean - and our relationship with the ocean is one of self-awareness, purpose and will.

And this is, of course, a godlike state; in the sense that a god is a cause not a consequence; outside the system and not contained-in the system; a creator not that which is created. And that is the whole point! For us to become adult, grown-up children of God, we must become like God in our nature, including our consciousness.

This moving towards divine consciousness can only happen by our choice, as an act from the agent-self.

*

Therefore, the task is to set-aside nostalgia for the original state of immersive participation: this is now impossible. It is to acknowledge the state of Modern Man as an error - a failure to move-on; a perpetual adolescence in which freedom has reached the absurd and self-refuting point of existential isolation - and got stuck.

Universal reality awlays was and still is there. We have cut-ourselves off from it. This was necessary as a phase - but is lethal as an end-point. We must re-engage with universal reality - and again participate in that universality; but from outside - in purposive thinking from our true selves.

Participation is given, knowledge is given, even love is given; but from where we are now, we need to make the choice and effort to acknowledge then create a new autonomous and free relationship with this reality.

Our task is to re-engage with universal reality in what eventually may become fully divine consciousness, but at first will be a partial, distorted and temporary kind of divine consciousness; which is thinking engaged with universal reality, and guided by love.

(The above is a development of the ideas of Owen Barfield, which were substaintially influenced by Rudolf Steiner.)

Shrine of King Charles the Martyr? I've lived in or around Didsbury for most of my life and had never heard of such a place...

It was an intriguing discovery, nonetheless - though odds-on a joke or a spot of wishful thinking - and I set off at once to explore...

The area between the park and the cricket club is occupied by a business park now. It's a nice, tree-lined part of town, but I had never visited the business park and never seen any reason why I should. I walked around for a good half-hour in the mist and drizzle. I thought I'd hate it but I actually found it quite a peaceful, almost Zen-like, place...

I saw nothing anywhere to suggest the existence of a shrine. The only old-looking thing I found was a small, chapel-like structure on a grassy roundabout with a triangular roof and an arch-shaped door of dark and heavy wood. I tugged the round, iron handle. The door didn't budge. I walked around to the other side and peered through the window. Nothing to see ... so shrugging my shoulders I went on my way, feeling more let down than I'd expected, given that I hadn't really, deep down, expected to come across a shrine at all.

'Maybe it's hidden' I mused, 'Maybe it's always been hidden. Maybe you can only see it with the eye of faith and imagination.' I was disappointed, I recall, that I didn't appear to have much of either...

I walked to the bus stop by the cricket club. It's only three stops from there to the Village. It was almost fully dark and the lights were on everywhere. The sky was clear and the air mild.

The bus was busier than I'd anticipated.. it stopped at the traffic lights next to the business park.

Then, where the squat glass buildings should have been, I was blessed (and wounded) instead by the most extraordinary sight - a colossal edifice - a Cathedral or Abbey of some kind - with tall high windows all ablaze in golden light. The roof was a giant triangle, with the thick silhouette of a cross standing out on top against the Western sky. I glimpsed a lawn, a bonfire, a ring of people and a flash of red.

Then the lights changed and the bus rolled forward.

Someone was playing a violin. I stood up on tiptoe and saw a girl with a fiddle in front the fire. She had dark hair and a red bandana, and the music I heard through the open window will sustain and inspire me, I swear, through this world and the next - mournful and fierce, exultant and yearning - a funeral dirge and a triumphal march at one and the same time. It was cut from a different cloth - that's all I can say - music from a higher level - a sphere of beauty and intensity that was all too soon behind me as the gears whirred and the bus gathered speed, powering on into the night.

I looked around but could tell straightaway that none of my fellow passengers had seen or heard a thing.

...
And that's where I left it.

Some things, I reckon now, are hidden because they're meant to be. They rest in the invisible realm - accessible only to the eye of imagination and faith - until the time for their appearance (or reappearance) in this world is ripe.

When Owen Barfield described the evolution of consciousness, he used 'evolution' in a pre-Darwinian sense of a developmental change analogous to the fertilised egg 'unfolding' to become a mature, adult organism.

In other words, Barfield regarded evolution not merely as change, but as purposive change, change with an aim or 'teleology'.

If the evolution of consciousness has a unified purpose and aim (isn't just a different purpose and aim for each entity), then this implies that there is a deity - as the source of purpose. Therefore, the evolution of consciousness is a consequence of some divine plan.

What could this divine plan be? For many Christians it will be 'theosis' - or the process of Men becoming more and more like God; aiming at becoming Sons and Daughters of God.

So, the evolution of consciousness is about our consciousness - that is, our way of thinking - becoming more divine, more like God's way of thinking.

This is a measure of the importance of the evolution of consciousness; and the need for it. Our life on earth is about 1. Accepting that salvation which is the gift of Jesus; and 2. Theosis - or working on the task of making ourselves more divine in our nature.

The moral aspect of theosis is very well known - but the consciousness aspect of theosis is almost wholly neglected - especially in mainstream Christian life.

In theosis we are not supposed only to 'do the right things', nor even to think the right things - but to think in the right way...

Sunday, 29 January 2017

From the perspective of the global elite, their servants in the mass media and the corrupted dupes among the intelligentsia who sustain them; populism means to be opposed to the rulership of the the global elite, their servants in the mass media and the corrupted dupes among the intelligentsia who sustain them.

And indeed, those who oppose the rulership of the global elites etc. would agree!

The difference of opinion about 'populism' is what it implies...

The question is: does populism imply 'fascism' or its opposite?

The global elites etc. imply that to oppose their rule is to favour 'fascism'.

But those who oppose the global elites etc. believe that 'fascism' is exactly what the global elites etc have given us, what they approve of, and what they are intending to give us more of.

*

(I put 'fascism' in quotes, because I believe the term is being misused by both sides - my understanding of fascism is that it was secular anti-communism - a non-religious reaction against communism. Since class-based utopian communism doesn't exist anymore in The West, but since has 'evolved' into the permanent revolution of New Leftism - 'identity politics'/ feminism/ antiracism/ multiculti/ sexual revolution/ political correctness - any modern 'fascism' must mean something qualitatively different from what it did in the past. Also. modern 'fascism' is (unlike the real thing) a label that nobody of significance explicitly embraces for themselves.)

*

I disagree with all secular politics as inadequate, ineffective and ultimately evil; although naturally - not being utterly insane, dishonest or corrupted - I disagree with the intentions of the global elite etc. much more than I disagree with the political aims of those who oppose them.

But opposition to the intentions of the global elite is not sufficient actually to improve things - at all depends on what is instead being aimed at.

And if the aims are secular - economic, political, utilitarian etc - then they cannot lead to anything more morally compelling than the world conceptualised as a glorified farmyard - an 'animal farm' indeed - where life is merely and ultimately about a choice of defining winners and losers, haves versus have-nots, exploiters and exploited...

In such a secular world; whoever is chosen, or whoever currently is a winner by 'luck' or force or skill...; in the end everybody willlose due to age, disease... and death.

Saturday, 28 January 2017

Although I have quite recently read and listened to the audiobook of The Silmarillion several times with some appreciation; my reaction to this work remains coloured by my first encounter; still retains much of the negative affects from my earliest encounter.

The Silmarillion was published on 15 September 1977; after some four years of ever more impatient waiting and speculation following the death of the author.

The publication date was just before I left home to go to medical school - which was itself a time of intense ambivalence; of excitement and expanding horizons mixed with loneliness and homesickness.
I therefore bought The Silmarillion as soon as it was available, and of course took it with me to stand on the bookshelf in my room, but I didn't read it immediately. Instead, I saved-up actually reading it until I had arrived at college.

My excitement at reading this volume, at long last (as it seemed to me), was therefore bound-up with my excitement at leaving the family and beginning university. Tolkien, especially Lord of the Rings, stood for much that was best about my teenage years - and I was hoping that this spirit would be extended into the new era.

My sense of anticipation was therefore about as great as was possible. Yet I was so disappointed with the Silmarillion that I did not even manage to finish it - or rather, found myself skipping largish sections to get to the last chapters. So, it was less 'disappointment' than an actively-unpleasant experience - I would have preferred, indeed I expected, something much like the Appendices of The Lord of the Ring; but I was actually offered something that seemed more like the Old Testament.

In The Silmarillion there was no editorial voice (such as was present in the Prologue and Appendices of LotR) to mediate between myself and the events described (these editorial voices were sometimes Tolkien at other times Bilbo or merry or various others). Instead, there were just these rather dull, bare-bones accounts of the doings of Valar and Elves; each free-standing and disarticulated; and with no hints of how to make sense of them.

At any rate, this was my negative impression - and this accounts for my residual sense of distaste on seeing that spine on my book-shelves.

Clearly I was not also, and Christopher Tolkien expressed regret for exactly the problems that most struck me, when he came to embark upon the History of Middle earth - and he certainly set them right.

In stark contrast was my encounter with the Book of Unfinished Tales, which was published in 1980 but which (thanks to the above aversion) I only read in about 1986, when I found a copy left behind in a holiday cottage in Keswick. I liked Unfinished Tales so much, that I always carried it around since; still have the same dog-eared paperback copy; and before long it kick-started a Tolkien resurgence of interest - strengthened by reading the Biography and Selected Letters and Tom Shippey's 'Road to Middle Earth' (again, rather later than their actual publication).

And this second phase never stopped but has continued up to the present. But still, deep down, I hold my grudge against the Silmarillion of 1977...

There is a sense of timeliness about some things that need to be done now - it is not meant to be exhaustive but...

1. Freedom
We need to be free because it is divine. Only if we are free can we be purposive.

2. Consciousness
...And freedom requires consciousness - self-awareness, or awareness of the Self (otherwise we are just responding to externals).

3. The self
It is the self which is (potentially) free. Our self is primordial, and also (partly) divine (God within). So we must work from The Self, and that is the basis of freedom.

4. Creation
Creation is pretty much the same thing as acting from our Self - our true, primordial and divine Self - because that is the only basis for true creation. Creation is further defined in terms of its harmony with the divine plan - in creating we are joining God's team. Creation (in this sense) is what we are supposed to Do in life.

5. Thinking
Thinking is the realm of reality in mortal life - not 'action'. This is because in true, real, primary thinking we are participating in a universal world, in principle perfectly accessible to everybody at any time or place henceforth.

6. Purpose
To have purpose requires the above. To do this, not another thing; to act from the Self as a Cause - and not be merely driven and a passive consequence... This is what makes sense of our having purpose in life. It is God and his plans (destiny) which makes that purpose non-arbitrary/ meaning-full. It is our Freedom to join in with this destiny, and Thinking which is the reality of our being participators, not-existentially-alone.

7. Love
So where is Love? Not something fitted-into - but some thing which contains. Love is why everything is related, and not detached; what even makes meaning and purpose possible. And why only in God's creation can there be meaning, purpose and the rest. God's realm is the realm of love - outside of which there is just stuff, chaos, isolated conscious entities.

The primary choice is therefore, to join with God's created realm of Love.

Friday, 27 January 2017

Everything nowadays and from now must be purposive. All must be clear, conscious, explicit (including repentance for past sins).

This is easy - but also difficult.

It makes choosing easier - because the choice is between the explicit and conscious on the one hand; and on the other, anyone (any organisation) who isn''t: that has a covert agenda, treats truth 'strategically', claims to be pursuing a good goal in some secretive way. All such is bad.

Our first aims must be spiritual, not material; and these spiritual aims must be acknowledged and taken into account upfront and explicitly.

This will, of course, be awkward and embarrassing; it will be regarded as crazy.

I personally must be clearer in speech and writing - not allow myself to be expediently misunderstood: this is a battle for the soul of each individual and of the nation.

The new perspective must be brought into whatever context it fits; not as propaganda but simply as a matter of honesty and clarity. My own position must be clear - as clear as I can make it (of course, it will be misunderstood wilfully - but that can't be helped).

Why? Because the time is now. What would have been futile or merely provocative and troublemaking a year ago now becomes a duty.

From this everything Good flows - without this, efforts will be hopeless. The actual medium of modern discourse, the mode by which we communicate, is the problem - it prevents utterly and in principle the core problem being solvable; and when people sense that the problem is insoluble they will not make the necessary effort.

Christianity without a spiritual awakening leaves modernity intact - leaves us alienated and lacking in meaning and cut-off from The World. Why should people bother with Christianity if it is only a set of 'beliefs' of the same kind and quality as the pre-existing beliefs? How can salvation and theosis be understood from a world view that is materialist, reductionist, positivist, dead?

Ideally spiritual awakening and Christianity should come together; but if not then spiritual awakening may need to come first - hope of relief from the daily, hourly, torment of meaninglessness and an undead life is (for most people) the most urgent need.

This spiritual craving is what drives the inversion of Good and the sexual revolution and the clinging to drugs and distractions.

The need should be met head-on; and everywhere possible.

Once that is decided, then the business of how to do it - here, now and by me - can be addressed.

Wednesday, 25 January 2017

Of course, the need is always for repentance, but it is more essential now than ever because we are so unrepentant. We don't see the need for it because we are convinced of our own rectitude.

A perfect example of this comes from the recent marches against President Trump... it is quite evident that those demonstrating see themselves as pillars of goodness. This is one of the most spiritually dangerous of places to be. It leads to pride, usually unrecognised and even regarded as a sign of virtue, self-satisfaction and so deep sin.

Repentance is always on offer but you have to ask for it. It is essential for any sort of spiritual progress.

The people on the anti-Trump demonstrations (like most demonstrators) are excellent examples of the unrepentant. To a man (or woman) they are convinced that they are good people. In fact they are projecting their own fears, hatreds and insecurities onto someone who is probably more bluster than anything else.

Their spiritual pride is plain to see, as is their refusal to consider the possibility that they are acting egotistically.

The actual rights and wrongs of the object of their ire is relatively unimportant. It is their assumption of personal and group virtue that makes them such good examples of the spiritually unrepentant and shows their fundamental lack of love and forgiveness.

They are like the crowd chasing the woman caught in adultery. Though they take the moral high ground it is transparently obvious that their real motivations are more to do with anger and self-righteousness than anything else.

Tuesday, 24 January 2017

The latest 'setback' to Brexit (Supreme Court stating that Brexit cannot happen without parliamentary approval) is actually another clarification of the issues at stake - if any English people hadn't yet woken-up to their situation, and the nature and plans of the ruling media-bureaucratic elite, then this will have helped greatly.

But the short-medium term political outcome is secondary to the absolute and primary necessity for national spiritual awakening.

And all events like this current 'legal challenge' to Brexit are solid gold revelations of the agents of global conspiracy and their assorted puppets, dummies, dupes and stooges... there they all are! - lined-up, on parade, spouting their opinions and plans, hopes and fears...

The English should be deeply grateful for how things have turned-out (or rather, how divine providence has gifted them). Our choice is made stark and binary - each person will be confronted by the need to exercise their agency with an understanding of the direction each possibility is aiming-at.

We now know - because it is being demonstrated - that Brexit is a mere proxy; it is a litmus test for approval versus disapproval of the on-going agenda of nihilism, despair and self-damnation.

The surprises keep coming, nobody has been able to predict anything for months - but this is good, because our state was so bad.

The longer it has gone on, the better the chance that the English people may (en masse) shake-off the spell of distraction and addiction - wake from their sleepwalk into Hell - and come to their senses.

What we need is for a great hush to descend, in our minds and in the world, and a season of watching and waiting to begin... a radical stillness and decluttering - creating space within so that we can hear the only thing we need to tune into at this time - the distant but approaching hum of the Great Music - the wild, thrumming call of the Divine that frees us from the drudgery of Economics and the illusion of limitless activity and growth.

The content of dream images has no great significance. But the drama, the flow, is of great significance...Whether there is anticipation, whether the anticipation leads to resolution, whether the anticipation leads to crisis. All the relationships of feeling become transposed into the life of the dream. Anyone who is familiar with dreams knows that ten or even more people may tell of dreams with utterly different contents, yet the underlying state of affairs is the same in all of them.

One man will say that in his dream he was climbing a mountain and on reaching the top had a delightful surprise; another says that he was walking through a dark passage and came to a door which opened quite unexpectedly; a third will speak of something else.

In the course they take, the dreams have no outer resemblance whatever, yet they originate from an identical experience, namely tension and relaxation which are symbolised in different pictures at different times.

What is of essential importance, therefore, is not the factual reality of the dream, but its inner dramatic action.

From the sequence of the meaningless pictures we must be able to recognise this dramatic action, for that is the reality in which the soul with its spiritual core of being is living while it dreams.

This is an entirely different reality from what is expressed in the pictures presented in the dream.

With the dramatic action you have the gist of the matter. The dream points to deep subconscious and unconscious grounds of the life of soul. But the pictures unfolded by the dream are only a clothing of what is actually being experienced in the course of it.

--- Two passages combined and edited from Sleep and Dreams by Rudolf Steiner - a selection edited by Michael Lipson, 2003---

**

NOTE: I have found the above insight, combined with a renewed conviction that dreams are meaningful and significant, to be a key which has had immediate effect on my own dreaming experience.

I have suddenly, and for the first time, been aware of my dreaming on wakening (or beginning to awaken) and remembered that I wanted to understand the dream...

I have then (while still hardly awake) easily been able to recall some of the dream and understanding it in the way described by Steiner above - in terms of a dramatic flow.

The process of recall and dramatic interpretation did not (so far) leave behind much in the way of specific 'knowledge' but does leave a sense of satisfaction, and an awareness of profundity of dreaming (whereas my usual experience of dreaming - 19 times out of 20, is of boring or annoying triviality).

The test of experience is therefore that it is the dream structure which matters, not the specific content; it is the structure expressed in terms of a dramatic flow of emotions or convictions akin to the emotional sequence induced by an effective story (e.g. in a novel, play or movie).

The significance of the dream needs to be 'reverse engineered' from one's sequential pattern of emotional responses to the dream...

"England is full of magicians. Hundreds! Thousands perhaps! Tell them this: Tree speaks to stone; stone speaks to water. Magic is not so hard as we have supposed. Tell them to read what is written in the
sky. Tell them to ask the rain! All of John Uskglass's old alliances are still
in place. I am sending messengers to remind the stones and the sky and the rain
of their ancient promises. Tell them . . . I cannot
explain it," he said...

Monday, 23 January 2017

This was a walk in which I was almost immediately aware that I was in the grip of synchronicities.

The first I noticed as a lovely Orange Pink sky in the East, with high wisps of clouds making lines and planes. Then, as I descended the street, there was a large crow perched on a slender tree top (the tree naked of leaves, and very tall and slender) - such sights always remind me of The Raven King in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - especially when I saw another crow in a similar situation on a tree across the road.

What brought me to a standstill, with an intake of breath, was that the newly risen sun was a glowing orange ball - sufficiently obscured that I could look directly at it, yet bright enough that its light was bathing all in the East.

Going past the ruined medieval chapel, a thought of the day before when I had watched a greater spotted woodpecker 'drumming' on a tree trunk in front of me - and been able to understand this phenomenon for the first time, and by direct personal observation (the primary basis of all Science!). listened out, and sure enough there was more woodpecker drumming to be heard.

Then, my progression was again arrested by the glorious sound of a song thrush - with its characteristic and unique 'fruity' tones, amidst a variety and inventiveness equal to the blackbird or nightingale. As I listened for a few minutes, I never heard it repeat.

Then - having to explain to a passer by why I was standing and staring up at a tree - I had a brief and pleasant conversation with a man from Yorkshire who was visiting the city to watch a football match, and was very interested by the parkland nearby (Jesmond Dene).

Since I "never" speak with any passers by on my walks, my guess is that this conversation was the purpose of these synchronicities - although I have no idea why. At any rate the sense of 'magic' dissipated after this; but it was lovely while it lasted - the world unfolding before me, revealing beauty and significance everywhere I looked.

Catholics believe that the church (e.g. its priests, its sacraments) is essential to salvation. Protestants believe that the essential relationship is between each Man and God - the church being variously more or less helpful; but not absolutely necessary to salvation.

I think this is the nub of the disagreement. When stated thus baldly I find I do not believe the church is essential to salvation. So I suppose I am 'a Protestant', by the above definition.

Why? Because I honestly cannot (I tried) believe that our loving Father - the creator - would have set-up this world on that basis.

I am, however, in agreement with the Catholic, especially Orthodox, focus on theosis (or progression towards a greater state of divinity) as the main business of life; what we are supposed to do. We are, I think, meant to make the choice that is salvation, which is something personal between each Man and God - and then to embark on theosis as the main focus of living... which for many people in many circumstances, leads to a church.

However, any specific church (or church-situation) may be either helpful or a hindrance (indeed a threat) to theosis - and may even attack the conditions of salvation.

So this, again, is a very Protestant attitude of mine; that ultimately I judge the church (in both general and specific manifestations) by the deepest discernment I can attain; not vice versa.

Therefore, I have to say that The Reformation was A Good Thing - despite everything! A good thing because its main point was true.

NOTE: I am talking here about the difference between Catholic and Protestant denominations as ideal types. In practice, many individual Catholics are Protestant, by the above definition - and practising Protestants (perhaps especially in Lutheran or Anglican churches) and members of new Christian groups (such as Mormons) may be 'Catholic' in their personal beliefs or assumptions.

Sunday, 22 January 2017

In this modern secular world, there are two main views about death - both deficient.

The usual view is that death is a bad thing, because it is extinction, annihilation. Only life can be good because death is nothing.

The more covert but increasing view is that death is a good thing for exactly the same reason.

In other words; because life entails suffering, sometimes extreme suffering; from this (actively pro-suicide/ pro-euthanasia) perspective, death is the only sure safety and escape.

The truth of the matter, so far as I can understand it, is that over the long terms mortal life requires death, because death is the only means of transition to resurrected everlasting life - so death is a good thing...

But also that a good death needs to come at the right time for a particular person, according to that person's destiny and life experience.

Thus death can be too early (for example when a person is killed as a consequence of the evil choice of another); or death can be too late (as when a person clings to life, when they know in their hearts that their proper time for dying has come).

So death is a good thing overall; but not all death. More precisely death a good thing when it comes at the right time and in the right manner; but the reason for a particular death in a particular circumstance may be bad - bad overall, for the person that dies, or for someone else.

(Note: This leaves aside the process of dying - which is a a major concern for many people - because of the fear of extreme suffering, especially pain. The point to recognise here is that dying can only be understood in the context of death. A further matter is also what happens to each specific person after death - again only answerable in context.)

Saturday, 21 January 2017

The sexual revolution has become - more-and-more over the past fifty years, and continuing to build - the primary socio-political litmus test.

*

The sexual revolution is therefore not an epiphenomenon of our cultural malaise - it is core: the single most effective and enduring agent of permanent Leftist revolution.

*

So far as I know, none of the supposedly 'right wing' or 'populist' movements in the West have yet made clear their collective (as well as personal) repentance of the sexual revolution; and until they do, they will simply remain what they currently are - which is merely a different species of Leftism (just as National Socialism was merely a different species of Socialism).

*

In a context where the sexual revolution is at the very core of the problem of secular Leftism - repentance of the sexual revolution must be upfront, clear and explicit.

Lacking repentance - as with the new Trump Presidency; we are merely seeing more-of-the-same; awakening has not happened; and there will be no change of direction for The West.

Friday, 20 January 2017

The extent to which the Global Establishment control the content of mainstream public discourse is by now... well, as close-to 100 percent as is necessary. This control is not just at the large scale; but down at a fine level of micro-management of the content of a multitude of small scale meetings and events all over the Western world.

This struck me as I was examining the forthcoming programme of weekly public lectures at a Northern English university - fully 75% were explicitly on pro-Political Correctness/ Social Justice/ Leftist themes - and the others apparently neutral. And it is the same everywhere else.

Back in 1981 Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote After Virtue in which he described the ethical incoherence of modernity - and in later books such as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry he explored the possibility of re-unifying society around a single ethical system.

As well as his favoured Aristotelian Thomism he considered the 'postmodern' radicalism exemplified by Nietzsche and later Foucault - but it was very obvious that such philosophies could not produce coherence; they were riven by internal contradictions.

Ernest Gellner wrote - about the same time - about how modern societies were characterised by functional specialisation among functional systems - but that the 'natural' default was for traditional societies to be unified by a single power structure. So that economics, science, education etc would all reflect the priorities of a ruling class (rather than pursuing their specific functions). In this sense a single unified 'bureaucracy' was spontaneous in large societies.

Well, the Modern West has a single unified bureaucracy, and it has as its philosophical basis exactly the incoherent radicalism which traces its ancestry to Nietzsche, and on back to Rousseau - a negative 'anti-philosophy' of protest against - originally - Christianity and especially sexual constraint.

So we have a unitary social system of morality and it is an incoherent system.

The strangeness of our current situation is less strange when it is realised that incoherence is a feature, not a bug. What is wanted is a single, global bureaucratic-media monolith controlling everything -- but in order to create conflict.

They don't want any winners - they want (and are getting) universal losers: all resentful, all constantly engaged in fighting-off incipient despair with brittle pride and desperate distraction.

This situation is probably unique in world history - to have a tyranny that deliberately creates and sustains and exacerbates confusion, conflict - and ultimately despair; and that is for the simple reason that it is demonic, not human, in its origins and stategic aims; and the demons have never been in strategic control before.

Our world is ruled by supernatural forces that have convinced everyone in power that there are no supernatural forces; with a spiritual agenda being implemented in a world for which the spiritual is a ridiculous delusion.

Until we can recover our ability to acknowledge, recognise and discern the spiritual and supernatural in Life - we will remain what we currently are: helpless pawns in their game of damnation.

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultán's Turret in a Noose of Light.

What a wonderful start! to one of the very greatest long lyrical poems in the English Language - by one of the great one-hit-wonders of poetry.I re-read this last night, astonished as so often before by its sustained richness and quotability; and moved to tears by the bitter-sweet sadness of its nihilistic hedonism.The success of the poem was, perhaps, ensured by its having not just a superb beginning but an even better ending - with the final four verses:

Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane,
The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again:
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same Garden after me—in vain!

And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on The Grass,
And in Thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one — turn down an empty Glass!

As well as being great poetry - Omar Khayyam is perhaps the most accessible and moving account of the Epicurian philosophy of life; which is one response to the assumption and belief that death means extinction.As such, it is a far deeper and more honest philosophy than the mainstream of today; Fitzgerald knew that if there is no God and mortal life is everything, and all meaning and purpose ultimately an illusion - then life was a sad business, and self-doping (with wine, or whatever works) and a painless, swift demise the only rational response.

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

(...)

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou;
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Omar is clear that if death is the end, then life is tragic - and the fact is inescapable. By contrast, Modern Man is too muddled, distracted and dishonest to acknowledge even such a simple inference. Yet the protagonist, again and again; by the very act of composing this poetry and his noticing of so much beauty and irony - and by his communication of it to the reader - implicitly denies his own assumptions... before lapsing back into doubt and regret.

And look—a thousand Blossoms with the Day
Woke—and a thousand scatter'd into Clay:
And this first Summer Month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshýd and Kaikobád away.

So, I read again, and entered that thought-world. And I realised again that either death is a good thing (when it happens in the right way, at the right time) or else it is a terrible thing which washed everything away - and the best we can hope for from it is to be overwhelmed by some relatively-pleasing delusion.And that this is metaphysics - a matter of assumptions and not (contra Omar) evidence; this basic decision we make (inevitably) on the deepest of intuitive grounds. The problem for Modern Man is that we believe our culture, rather than our intuitions.But - I will give Omar the last word:

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultán after Sultán with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahrám, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Cæsar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.

And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean -
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!

Ah! my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears
Today of past Regrets and future Fears;
To-morrow? - Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.

Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest;
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to Rest.

And we, that now make merry in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new Bloom;
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend, ourselves to make a Couch—for whom?

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and - sans End!

In their souls, human beings more and more come to resemble the thought, to resemble that which they regard as knowledge. This will seem a strange truth to the modern mind, but it is so, nevertheless. To see certain things in their proper light, with clarity of thought, with thoughts saturated with reality — that is vitally important.

For example; to regard Darwinism as the one and only valid conception of the world, believing the only possible truth to be that man descends from the animals - that I descend entirely from forces which also produce the animals ... such thoughts, in our age, tend to make the soul resembles its own conceptions of itself.

When the body is discarded, the soul is then confronted with the sorry fate of having to perceive its resemblance with its own thought! A man who lives in the physical body believing that animal forces alone were at work in his evolution, fashions for himself a kind of consciousness in which he will perceive his own likeness to animal nature.

It is ordained that in times to come, what the human being considers himself to be, that he will become.

This development is part of the wise guidance of worlds, in order that the human being may attain full and free consciousness of the Self. On the one side the Gods were bound to make it possible for man to become what he makes of himself; and in order that he might imbue this self-created being with super-sensible meaning, that he might be able to find in this self-created being, something that gives him an eternal aim — in order that this might be, Christ Jesus fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha.

*

Harmony with the Self, together with a knowledge which lets man after death be truly man, — this will arise for future times only if human beings become aware, here, in the physical body, of their true connection with the spiritual world.

Those who are afraid of concrete facts of spiritual knowledge because of their materialistic ideas will, of course, for a long time yet be unwilling to acknowledge that any such change took place - nevertheless it will have to be acknowledged sooner or later.

In order to further their aims, the Spirits of Darkness will need to attach particular value to the breeding of confusion among men so that they will not succeed in forming the right thoughts and ideas into which, after death, they are transformed.

What man thinks himself to be, that he is obliged to become...
This is a truth that was destined, after the great changes in the nineteenth century and from then onwards, to find its way to men. The human being must be voluntarily anything that he can be really; he must be able to think about his own being if he is to be truly himself in his life of soul.

*

Spirits of Darkness, who oppose Man's destiny, inspired human beings to announce the following: “Man is what he eats.” And although this is not, in theory, widely acknowledged, the practical conduct of life amounts very nearly to being an acknowledgement of the principle that man is what he eats — that and nothing else.

Indeed this principle is more and more being applied and developed in external life. To a far greater extent than people believe, the grievous and tragic events of the present time are an outcome of the tenet: Man is what he eats. Humanity is already infiltrated by the principle that “man is what he eats.” And it gives rise, indirectly, to much contention.

That is why the spread of thoughts and ideas corresponding to the realities of the times is so very necessary. Thought will gradually have to be known as a concretely real power of the soul, not merely as the miserable abstraction produced so proudly by the modern age.

Men living in earlier times were still linked, by an ancient heritage, with the spiritual world. Although for many centuries now, atavistic clairvoyance has almost entirely ebbed away, this heritage still lives in the feeling and in the will. But the time has come when everything that is conscious must become a real power — hence the Spirits of Darkness strive to counter really effective thoughts by abstract thoughts in the form of all kinds of programmes for the world.

*

Thoughts must be imbued with greater and greater reality.
There are still many people who say: “Oh, well, in all good time we shall discover what transpires after death; why trouble about it now? Let us attend to the requirements of life and when we reach yonder world we shall soon discover what it is.”

But if it is true that in yonder world a man becomes what he has pictured himself to be, then something else is also true. For example: A man dies, leaving relatives behind him. Although thought may not be entirely lacking in these relatives, they may be materialistically minded, and then, quite inevitably, they will think either that the dead man is decaying in the grave or that what still exists of him is preserved in the urn.

This thought is a real power; it is an untruth. When those left behind think that the dead man no longer lives, is no longer there; this thought is real and actual in the souls of those who form it. And the dead man is aware of this thought-reality, is aware of its significance for him.

It is therefore a matter of fundamental importance whether those left behind cherish in their souls the thought of The Dead living on in the spiritual world, or whether they instead succumb to the woeful idea that the dead man... well, he is dead; he lies there decaying in the grave.

Wednesday, 18 January 2017

A frequent question - but what is interesting is that typical modern man cannot be convinced by revelatory miracles, because he does not believe them possible.

Reported events which would have been regarded as convincing by people of the past are now always and inevitably written-off as having some other cause - such as an illness (eg an hallucination or delusion), or self-deception (wishful thinking) or as being a manipulative lie.

For example, yesterday I was thinking hard about some metaphysical theories, jotting the conclusion down, then closing my eyes to think more; when I briefly nodded-off and had a dream in which somebody whom I knew and loved who had died, appeared and told me that my theorising was correct, and that they were made happy by it.

I jotted this dream down after awakening, and at first regarded it as a divine affirmation. But by the next day, being a modern kind of person, I had come to regard the dream as doubtful or wishful or just random - and it had lost most of its affirmative force. The dream made no difference either way - it was an epiphenomenon...

Yet mine was, on the face of it, pretty much the kind of dream we know from the Bible, upon which the fate of Empires might hang (the Pharaoh's dreams) or the fate of Christianity (Joseph, husband of Mary's dreams). From this perspective I might be making a very large error in dismissing my dream on the pre-decided-cultural-assumption that dreams 'cannot be' of any relevance to truth.

Nowadays, even if many, apparently normal, people are witnesses; then miracles (like Fatima - look it up) are effortlessly written-off (some kind of mass delusion/ fraud, perhaps?) - because modern people know they just cannot be true.

But this applies even when miracles happen to ourselves. In the extreme of experiencing something impossible while in a clear state of consciousness, many modern people will assume that they must have had a psychotic episode of some sort, rather than regard it as a divine sign.

Taken in this larger, historical perspective; many or most modern people are bombarded with divine signs and mini-miracles and revelations on a frequent basis - I mean things like significant or predictive dreams, precognitive convictions, visions occurring in states of altered consciousness, synchronicities, powerful feelings of knowledge, telepathy, sudden unexpected abilities or achievements or serendipities, or healings...

It is not that we are - most of us - short of experiences that would have been regarded as evidence of divine intervention; it is that we have already decided that such experiences cannot happen, and we are fore-armed with a spectrum of alternative explanations.

What is needed is not some overwhelming experience that would prove, once and for all, that God is real and exists - because these have already happened many, many times - in general and to ourselves - and we always manage to ignore them.

What is needed is a change in ourselves - so that we at least regard such things as genuine possibilities; and also that the truth is never found by having only one possible explanation for an event. Everything that happens requires interpretation - whether in science or in real life.

(In science and life; theory comes first, because it is the theory that determines what counts as evidence.)

So it is, in principle, impossible for anything to happen that could only happen as a consequence of divine intervention - there will always be other possibilities.

Having acknowledge the possibility; it is up to each of us, as individuals, to evaluate and judge whether any particular event was a divine sign for us - or not. And if we do decide it was a divine sign, then nobody else should be allowed to gainsay the fact!

Doubt is an over-abundant hence cheap commodity nowadays - conviction. meaning and purpose are the rare and precious treasure of our age. When God gives us these, we would be ungrateful and self-destructive idiots to reject them.

According to the prevailing, mainstream, 'scientific'/ materialist assumptions - communication is notpossible.

This is because these assumptions entail that (to summarise Owen Barfield in his essay The Coming Trauma of Materialism):

1. 'Nature' is a separate autonomous and objective realm - which can be affected by Man only from outside. That is, Nature is something that precedes man, and always has gone one separately from human awareness and direct-participation. In effect, Man is an optional-extra for Nature.

2. Each individual Man is a separate part of the objective system of Nature - we aren't connected in any ultimate or fundamental way; because...

3. One mind can communicate with another mind only via the medium of physical processes.

Most people haven't connected the dots sufficiently to realise that the standard explanations of communication rule-out any possibility of communication (except by sheer random chance - which is, of course, not communication at all) since the scheme has multiple steps of representations, none of which are reliable, none of which can be checked.

In sum, according to the usual scheme, we have no idea whether what we perceive is real, distorted, partial or just imaginary (an hallucination, perhaps) - and when we send out a communication we have no idea whether or not our communication has been understood (nor even received) - not least because any check on understanding has to use the same chain of uncertain representations the validity of which we are attempting to check.

What this means is that we cannot know whether somebody else is thinking the same thing as we ourselves are thinking. Hence our minds are utterly isolated from everything else - including all other people.

This creates a reductio ad absurdum for what we suppose to be human discourse, and indeed human existence. Fairly obviously, if communication is not possible, then hardly anything has any point to it - certainly not what I am currently writing!

Why then is such an absurd and self-refuting metaphysical scheme so utterly dominant in modern Western society? Why do we simultaneously assume (in our actions) that communication is possible, yet (in our assumptions) that communication is impossible? Why does not this incoherence lead to abandonment of materialist metaphysics?

The reason is that if we explicitly were to regard (as, surely, we ought to!) communication as possible; then this has consequences which would be extremely disruptive to the materialist basis of modernity.

In particular, if communication is possible, then we must each be able to think exactly the same thought as another person. Real communication involves a direct sharing of thoughts.

What I mean is that if you and I are to be in communication, then when we think of a triangle, a face, the theory of evolution by natural selection or anything else... we must both be able to think exactly the identical thought.

(Not a similar thought, nor a precise copy of a thought; but exactly the same unit of thought.)

This, in turn, means that the thought cannot be inside either or both of our minds; but must instead be 'located' in some realm to which we both have access. In effect, we could only think exactly the same triangle (and therefore experience communication) if both of us were thinking in some kind of common 'space' where this triangle was located.

Now, the specifics of how this might work - e.g. what kind of a realm the triangle exists in and how each of our minds might get access to it - are conjectural and metaphysical (and therefore partial, incomplete and simplified); but the basic idea of the possibility of more than one person simultaneously thinking the same thought seems hard to deny - if, as I say, real communication is to be regarded as a possibility.

(Leaving aside the next, and 'epistemological' question of how we would know that any particular example was a real communication. First the metaphysical assumptions allowing the possibility must be established, before epistemology can be discussed.)

So we reach the striking, and radically disruptive, conclusion that if communication is possible, then people must be able to think outside of their own minds in some common domain which is multiply accessible; and that this must be possible outside of the material world and therefore outside of the 'five senses'.

Furthermore, that real communication is (at least at present) undetectable and unmeasurable - but works by entirely different routes and means.

Since pretty much everything depends on communication, the conclusion apparently forced upon us is that we absolutely depend upon some kind of direct, undetectable and unmeasurable, yet universal, shared realm of 'thoughts'.

So you can see why the incoherence of modern ideas of communication are able to survive decade after decade, despite being necessarily wrong and senseless - the alternative is so profoundly at odds with modern culture as to be (for most people most of the time) literally un-thinkable.

Back in the middle sixties the idea was that sex was simultaneously the most important thing in the world - such that nothing whatsoever should be allowed to stand in its path. People of all ages (including kids... that was a big theme in the sixties) should be allowed to do what they wanted, when they wanted-to, where they wanted and with whom (or whatever) they wanted...

And yet at the same time, sex was unimportant. The reason that it would be okay, a good thing, for all restrictions and limitations to be removed from sex was that sex didn't really matter - sex was merely a fun form of exercise, another variant of relaxing with friends, on the same level as having a beer or smoking marijuana.

The point was: sex should be care-free...

Well that didn't last long, it didn't last even half a decade. As soon as the sexual revolutionaries had won the first battle, they revealed that carefree sex was just bait, or a stalking horse for something very different - and then sex and sexuality and sexual identify - the whole thing - became, and ever-increasingly is, a source of angst.

So what the the agenda of the mainstream powers when it comes to sex? They neither favour it nor do they wish to stamp it out; but favour both at the same time or alternating. They are not for biological sex, nor for chosen gender - but both; not for same-sex attraction nor for sex change - but both; they do not regard sexuality and identity as fixed, but also they do - they do not regard sexuality as a matter of lifestyle choice, but yet also say that it is (lifestyle itself is regarded as trivial at one moment and compelling at another)...

What is the conclusion? The conclusion is that what they really want is angst. They want people to be focused on sex, but existentially unsure about it. They want them to do many contradictory things, therefore always to be in doubt about whether what they do is right or best.

They want to create high status victim groups and despised aggressors - but always be swapping these around and changing their rank order so nobody is ever confident about what they are supposed to do, everybody is tentative and fearful about their own status; and whatever it is that they are currently feeling, hoping for or doing - should be subject to constant, gnawing doubt.

Constant worry, endemic conflict, miserable obsession... these are exactly what was wanted from the sexual revolution, that always was the objective and end-point.

Hence the multiple Establishment initiatives to inculcate sexual confusion into school kids - especially those too young to be worried about, or even interested in, sex. They are trying to ensure that the whole subject of sex is problematised; and are building existential anxiety into the foundations of human personality, so that sexuality is intrinsically insecure.

A population of permanent, all round, neurotics - desperate for reassurance and craving relief... that's the aim. And they've achieved it!- pretty much.

Monday, 16 January 2017

The striking thing about the modern situation for me, from my perspective - is that most people think that things are OK and most people are basically 'good'. Whereas I have the perspective that our society is in a terrible way, and that the mass of people are more evil than ever at any time or place in history.

But in fact there is no conflict between these perspectives at the level of 'evidence' - the conflict arises from metaphysics. In other words the conflict of my view and the majority view is at the level of what constitutes 'bad'.

*

Most people measure the badness of society in some publicly-detectable, measurable, material way - maybe in terms of wealth and poverty; pleasure and suffering; freedom or oppression; peace or violence; creativity or stagnation... and so forth. From such perspectives the modern world is maybe not bad, maybe pretty good...

But from my perspective, I am looking at the soul of people en masse - and I notice that people are alienated from nature, other people, and themselves - and that everything is regarded as arbitrary and temporary; there is no real and eternal pattern or purpose or unfolding shape to the totality of everything.

I notice that public discourse is wholly about measurements and inferred (but never actually known) feelings during mortal life, and that mortal life is regarded as all there is and without any larger context.

Most people regard economic collapse, war, famine, epidemics as the worst possible things that can happen.

But - when I am at my best, and thinking using my deepest (divine) qualities - I realise that the worst possible things are spiritual - things like denial of the reality of the real, hopelessness (despair), a conviction that life is senseless and goes nowhere, underlying and unsolvable guilt or resentment, and a desire for death and indeed for annihilation.

All of which amounts to the conviction of an ultimate, existential isolation - the unavoidable situation of everything always being cut-off from everything.

*

Most people measure the badness of people in terms of whether they are violent, altruistic, hard-working, well-mannered and so forth.

But I measure the badness of society in transcendental terms of whether we pursue The Good - that is truth, beauty, virtue in unity.

And I notice that the official Western version of Good - which we are encouraged to pursue, and which most people have internalised such that they are not explicitly aware of it - is an inversion (not complete inversion, but substantially so) of The Good as known through human history and in the majority non-Western world.

What The West calls Good is substantially what children, tribal people, genuinely religious people (past and present) call bad - whether in the realms of truth, beauty or virtue - and instead of unity, the world is understood in terms of multiple unrelated specialisms.

And that bad is strongly encouraged, promoted and rewarded both by the official world of government, bureaucracy, charities and mainstream religions, education etc and by the mass media.

So we have a world of expedient dishonesty, of hype and spin and deliberate misleading as well as aggressive lying on a massive scale - none of this repented. We have ugliness of art and architecture, theatre and movies, and the environment and of the organisation of life (the iron cage of bureaucracy in general). We have relabelled sexual manipulation and exploitation and objectification and obsession as virtue; and disorder as better-than-normal.

*

So the essence of the massive disagreement between my interpretation of the badness of 'things' and people is simple - albeit based on assumptions that are usually unknown, denied or taken as facts rather than assumptions.

What is needed, perhaps more than anything else - is an awareness of assumptions and the fact that they are assumptions.

Sunday, 15 January 2017

I agree - and indeed try to make my holidays into some kind of pilgrimage - focused on a specific act of pious homage to some person whom I admire or place that has personal meaning, when possible; although I don't take this aspect as seriously as I should.

For instance, in 2011 when the family visited Oxford I went to CS Lewis's church in Headington Quarry to see where he was buried (alongside his brother Warnie), attended a communion service and sat in Jack Lewis's regular seat (which was hidden from the pulpit - Lewis used to sneak-out before the sermon, typically). By arrangement, I and a few others were shown around Jack and Warnie's home The Kilns, and wandered the grounds - meditating and reading.

I walked one evening alone to look at Tolkien's two homes in North Oxford, later visited his grave; and one early morning found the graves of Charles Williams and Hugo Dyson.

On a 1998 visit to New England I visited Emerson's house in Concord, and the graves of the Transcendentalists in Sleepy Hollow; and my wife and I walked around Walden Pond very early one Fall morning when nobody else was around. In New Hampshire, we later visited Franconia and Bethlehem - for their connections with Robert Frost.

In the Christian worldview, no final victory here in this world is possible, but final victory when the world is remade is inevitable.

Hence, in Middle Earth, the men of the west struggle onward without any glimmer of hope. The hopelessness of the quest is emphasized in many places (including in the true meaning of Strider’s true name). In Narnia, nothing done by Tirion can halt the Last Battle or the final downfall of night. In both cases, the protagonists are humble: schoolchildren or hobbits...

For the Christian worldview the question is not which side will win. In Christian stories, evil is strong, but evil destroys itself. The question is which side will the protagonist cleave to.

Lucy (particularly in Prince Caspian) was loyal; Edmund was not. Sam was loyal, and gave up the Ring; Boromir was not...

Another example is the story of David and Goliath.
From a pagan point of view, the story of David and Goliath is absurd. Hercules kills giants, not shepherd boys. There is no drama, no conflict, because a boy slaying a giant with a lucky shot is ridiculous.

But this is a story as oft retold and as dramatic as anything in literature: because the drama is in the fact that the army of professional soldiers, and David’s own older brothers, are terrified, and will not fight, and David will fight.

There is no mystery as to who will win: God Almighty is on David’s side. The mystery is why and how David finds the strength to believe that impossible, unlikely, unearthly truth.

Friday, 13 January 2017

Metaphysics is the name for our most fundamental assumptions concerning reality - and the particular horror of modern metaphysics is the pretence that there isn't one.

If there is to be any awakening of The West in general and Albion in particular - the first step is for people to become aware that they have metaphysical assumptions; and like all such assumptions they are assumed - and not, therefore, the consequence of any kind of evidence or proof.

There is no name for the set of assumptions of the modern West - and that is no accident; because the pretence is that we have seen-through metaphysics, and confront 'reality' directly.

We (supposedly) live without illusions, we face the facts, we live according to the bottom-line - we seize the day.

We assume (among other things) that God never was, the soul is a myth, death is utter annihilation, science is the only truth, that Human Life is entirely about maximising pleasure and minimising suffering... and yet we deny that these are assumptions.

*

In my experience there is nothing harder to achieve, than to get somebody-else to acknowledge their assumptions - and that other assumptions are possible!

(This metaphysical awareness is not mainly a matter of high intelligence; it is mostly a matter of attention-span and serious engagement - both of which are even rarer than high intelligence.)

Yet metaphysics is not just another 'relativism' - the fact that we make some assumptions does not mean that any one set of assumptions is just as good (or bad) as any other set of assumptions; because metaphysics is not the deepest we can go.

Beyond metaphysics there is what could be called intuition; by which I mean the ultimate reflective evaluation of our ultimate selves: that which convinces us, that we believe, what strikes us as most valid and true.

(This depends on many possible factors - coherence is one. Simplicity is another; comprehensibility is very important - we need to understand our own metaphysics; appeal is another - what strikes us as good, beautiful and true. But in practice the reasons for evaluation may be unclear and unarticulated: we just know.)

So, if we can excavate, isolate and acknowledge the nature of our metaphysics, then we can validly change it for something better.

We can - we really can! - awaken from the deadly hypnotic trance of modernity; and awaken to a better world - a world of breadth, depth, meaning and purpose.

*

This is important - I would say vital - because it is our metaphysics which is literally killing us in The West.

And the great weakness of Western metaphysics is that it is incoherent - indeed it is self-refuting; because when pushed to the line it claims that incoherence is reality; and the incoherence of metaphysics mirrors the incoherence of Real Life.

(It is this incoherent assertion of incoherence which leads to the claim to have refuted metaphysics; to the claim somehow to have confronted reality directly and unmediated and thereby discovered its incoherence.)

Yet from this insistence of incoherence, The West derives its tyrannical iron cage of mandatory bureaucratic surveillance and control; and its moralising and immoral mass media - that vast effort at ideological saturation bombing which IS the modern world.

People will not escape this suffocating System merely by discovering its lies, nor even by discovering its incoherence - they will escape by recognising a metaphysics of expanded acknowledgment and perception of realities; of meaning and purpose - and by recognising its validity in the very depth of their intuitive self.

This is the work of an instant! Albeit it may take weeks, months, years of decades to build up to that moment.

But the possibility is always there, and never can be closed-off altogether - or, if it is, we have no-one to blame but our-selves.

Our era has been described as The Audit Society, because corporate life is increasingly dominated by accountancy-derived concepts and technologies.

Accountability is one of these concepts - as its name implies. Discourse on the desirability of ‘increased accountability’ has become ubiquitous in political, managerial and even journalistic discourse. Accountability is assumed to be an intrinsically desirable goal, and nobody ever claims that one can have ‘too much’ accountability - the pressure is always for more.

Yet accountability is a slippery rhetorical term with two largely distinct meanings: a sharply-defined technical managerial meaning, and a looser, more general or ‘popular’ meaning. This opens the way for accountability to be used a rhetorically manipulative fashion - by shifting back and forth between technical and general meanings.

In general discourse, accountable means something similar to ‘responsible’, and carries connotations of ‘being answerable-to’. Conversely, to be unaccountable may be used synonymously with ‘irresponsible’ and ‘out of control’. Since responsible behavior is universally approved, then calls to increase ‘accountability’ sound self-evidently desirable.

The technical meaning of accountability in managerial discourse refers narrowly to the duty to present auditable accounts. Originally, this referred to financial documentation that was adequate in terms of completeness and self-consistency - such that it is amenable to the process of cross-checking which constitutes the basis of audit.

The current managerial use of accountability is a direct extension of this financial usage - an accountable organization is one that has the duty to present auditable accounts of its activities - in other words an accountable organization is one that will provide comprehensive and self-consistent documentation of whatever it does.

Only insofar as it is legitimate to assume that the provision of auditable documentation is synonymous with responsible behaviour is there any overlap between the technical and general concepts of accountability.

But the rhetoric of accountability operates on the basis of a ‘quick switch’ between the two. Any individual or organizational problem which can be connected to irresponsible behavior can be termed unaccountable in the general sense - and then the discourse can be switched over to a technical level in which the solution to unaccountable behavior is to set-up regular audit cycles that require comprehensive and self-consistent documentation of that behavior.

Behavior may be rendered technically ‘accountable’ even when the real world behavioral problems that led to the introduction of audit are unchanged or exacerbated.

Now that this model of accountability has become habitual, it is able to generate problems of technically ‘unaccountable’ behavior, even when there is no evidence that actual behaviour has been irresponsible.

There is a profound circularity about this reasoning. Accountability involves an assumed model of how organizations ought to operate, and how individual judgment should be regulated within these organizations.

The drive for 'increased accountability' may therefore operate as an excuse to justify managerial takeover.

Behavior is labelled as unaccountable (hence unacceptable) simply because it is not subject to managerial control, and this is taken (by managers and politicians who wish to control this behavior) to imply a need to introduce audit systems. Audit systems may then be set-up to advance the interests of those who have introduced them.

For instance, many University academics retain significant autonomy in their work, exercising independent judgment over such matters as hour-by-hour time-allocation, teaching style and content, and the subject matter of personal research. Such autonomy has - over many years and in many cultures - proved to be the only way to generate and maintain high academic standards.

However, this autonomy poses a serious threat to political control, since there is no formal mechanism by which academic behaviors can be managed. The concept of accountability provides the answer.
If typical academic behaviour can be labelled as technically ‘unaccountable’, and if ‘unaccountable’ is regarded as unacceptable by definition, then there is a perfect rationale for introducing a formal system of monitoring and control.

Someone might be a brilliant and popular University teacher, a first-rate researcher of international reputation, a diligent administrator, and employed by a prestigious university - but technically such a person is ‘unaccountable’ when there are no formal institutional mechanisms for monitoring, documenting and regulating behavior.

Autonomy is re-packaged as irresponsibility while subordination of employees by top-down and hierarchical control mechanisms is restated in terms of ‘increased accountability’.

The writer is our Father in Heaven addressing us, his children, by means of an imaginary letter ...

Another question you would surely like to ask me, is why I should need so many children around about me in this creative scheme of mine. Why would not, say, twenty or fifty be enough?

To begin with you do not yet know the depth of my nature. You do not yet know just how much I have to give. If what I had to give were just a simple thing it would not require an elaborate situation to give it in, but what I have to give is most elaborate, and so, to create the necessary width of understanding, I need to find expression for all my qualities, and lay them all out for you to see.

As many of these qualities have to be lived, so I need many different children to live amongst one another.

My plan of creation is vast in your sight because my being is vast also, but do not let that be a cause to think that any of you do not matter to me; you matter to me all as individual children and also as players in my play. If you do not play your part, who is to do it for you? No one can, and it thus leaves a gap.

You are all players in my orchestra, and I cannot make the sounds I had hoped for if any of you are unable to play the individual parts that make up the whole piece of music.

But my orchestra is not like yours. In my orchestra no two parts are the same but they are all needed to make up the true beauty of the sound I have visioned.

I need a large family because I need to express a large number of characters, so do not think only of rushing to my heaven, for it is not necessarily in heaven that you will be able to learn the part you have to play.

When you think of my music, try to remember that it is a continuous creation and not a single piece that is to be repeated. I have no desire to repeat my music, rather do I spin it newly all the while, so what you add to it now, and at any other time, is continually affecting the performance.

You and I are making this music now, and each of your sounds is valuable to the effect, and I am the one who all the time gathers them in and weaves them together into a whole of constantly changing music.

Thus I even make use of the discordant sounds since they all express in some way the reality of the complete situation.

Not that I would have you think that I sit back and coldly 'conduct' this music, or feel any pleasure from discordant notes. I am doing many things at the same time in ways that you would not yet understand, and each discordant note pulls at my heart and my sympathy.

My music is not made to entertain, it is the expression of our endeavour, and effort, and suffering, woven together with the beauty of the beginning and the end.

It is this very music that I use to order and adapt my school of living to the needs that I sense in it. The music reports to my sensitive ear the exact condition of my whole work and my nature responds to its beauty and its needs.

Aide from Steeleye Span, my favourite group of 1974 was certainly Gryphon; a four peice band with recorders, crumhorns and bassoon, guitar and percussion - who performed mostly Medieval and Tudor music with a folky verve and humour; and some jazzy improvisations

Including 'Mummerset' accents and musical jokes:

In the late spring of 1974 I saw the my Dream Team combination of Gryphon supporting Steeleye Span at the Colston Hall in Bristol - maybe the best concert ever, for me?

Within a year - as seemed to happen a lot in the seventies, Gryphon had brought in electric guitars 'progressed' towards rock music - and were involved in providing music for the Royal Shakespeare Company Tempest production - leading to perhaps their loveliest achievement - the title track from the second album Midnight Mushrumps.

And in less than a year from MM, the 'progression' of Gryphon had essentially left-behind their early selves and they became a pure rock band, at which point I lost interest.

But the first album and about half of the second one, remain firm favourites - and the abiding image or vision of an exceptional group of highly musical young men having fun:

Thursday, 12 January 2017

If you know the intentions and motivations of some person or institution - and what they want you to do and not-to-do - then you should be able to infer enough of what is really going-on behind the scenes (behind the smokescreen of misleading, hype, spin and outright lies - cunningly selected and mixed with a few truths and facts)... that you can make the right decisions, despite considerable ignorance.

The problem is that we almost-never know the 'whole story' of what is really going-on. Mostly this is just impossible because so many things are secret, complex, remote, inter-related - and of course because in a world of dishonesty nobody knows what is really going-on (including because people, and intuitions, are lying to themselves - all the time).

But not knowing the whole, true story is no excuse for not doing the right thing - especially in a society so polarised as this one! We should not delay nor wait for 'more evidence' or 'future research' before knowing the right course. We should not 'give the benefit of the doubt' to those we know to be (overall) wickedly-motivated.

Because when we know that some person or group has malign intentions towards us - or simply malign intentions in general - then we can be sure-enough that what they really want us to do is what we should not do; and vice versa.

For example, when the Chinese communist dictatorship encouraged intellectuals to 'let a thousand flowers bloom' by speaking freely and openly about their most radical ideas; this was in order to identify and eliminate dissidents. As a malign ideology, what they wanted was bad for Good people.

And when Western progressives suddenly expressed an intense interest in 'preventing bullying' in schools by setting-up all sorts of new surveillance and monitoring systems, what they really wanted was to enforce political correctness and the sexual revolution.

Of course, if they know we are assuming the above, they may try to bluff us by asking us to do what they do not want us to do, and forbidding exactly what they most want us to do. But this is usually not possible - and can be a strategic disaster.

And, at the point of contact between the individual and the malign oppressor, it is usually clear (perhaps on reflection) what they really want us to do (although they will typically attempt to disguise this by re-framing and misdirection).

When (as often and increasingly happens) we are asked to sign-up for some new project or campaign to raise awareness of this or encourage that; to protect this or suppress that; to raise-funds-for or subsidise this - alternatively to defund or to tax that - then it should be clear enough what is really going-on that we know what we ought to do.

And the same applies to slippery slopes. Minor 'reforms', presented as merely a regularisation of the existing state or voluntary or too trivial to become bothered-about; should be assume to be 'stalking horses' strategically directed as major, mandatory and harmful changes; when they emanate from sources we know to be malign.

It really isn't all that difficult - if we allow ourselves to notice and respond to our innate discernment.

And our first duty is not personally to support - with our own efforts, money and cooperation - that which we believe to be evil-in-intent.

Enough people behaving this way would make positive changes happen - very rapidly; without any need for planning or organisation. It is something everybody could, and ought-to, do.

Wednesday, 11 January 2017

Ultimately, everything depends on discernment - by which I mean the capacity to evaluate and distinguish-between Good and evil.

Yet discernment cannot be done on objective grounds, but must be done by inference.

And our ability to discern is fallible - we can be fooled, we can fool ourselves, we can mistake expediency for Goodness (or, indeed, suffering for Goodness)... there is no reliable and valid method of discernment.

As an example of the situation we find ourselves in, I will use the discernment between angels and demons (who can simulate or impersonate angels).

1. We cannot do without angels - by which I mean that they influence us and the world, and if we choose to ignore this influence then this is a self-blinding against a vital aspect of reality.

Since we are not meant to ignore (=deny the reality or significance of) angels - we must discern them from demons.

Ignoring the whole issue is therefore not a 'safe option' - we need to discern.

2. It is difficult to discern angels from demons. There are no objective, measurable, publicly-agreed criteria (e.g. demons may appear and beautiful and feign to be Good; angels may be tough or even harsh in their actions or advice, because they understand more and see further).

3. Although we cannot discern objectively or reliably; because we need to discern, we can assume that we can discern - since God is both our loving Father and the creator.

4. How then are we 'supposed to' discern angels from demons if both our intellect (mind) and instincts (gut-feelings) are so prone to error as to be all-but useless?

The answer is by The Discernment of the Heart.

This is something that in some ways we do naturally - but we tend to over-ride it with intellect and/ or instincts; and we also need to learn to distinguish and comprehend it.

The discernment of the Heart is possible because it was built-into us by God, as our ultimate and bottom-line guidance. As such it is immune to distortions of logic' or 'evidence' and to emotional manipulations - it is reliable and true; but the 'flip side' is that the signal is so simple and pure that it is hard to justify, indeed sometimes it is hard even to notice the evaluation of the Heart among the noise and distraction of the world and our minds and bodies (and the deceptions of demons!)...

(Because it has no method or measure, the discernment of the Heart is also easy to deny in a materialist society such as this one.)

5. The situation is: we must discern, we can discern, but we will err in this - not by error of discernment, but by ignoring, over-riding, or being unable or unwilling to detect this discernment of the Heart.

6. Therefore we must discern, we will err; and therefore we must be ready and willing to repent.

7. This, then, is the Human Condition. This is our destiny and path and how we are meant to live.

The 'set-up' is that:

1. we must discern
2. we will err
3. we need to repent

This is - broadly - how we need to approach matters such as angels, demons, religious experiences, signs of the Holy Ghost, the evaluations of truth and holiness, the validity of theories (including theologies), books (including scriptures), institutions (including churches) and persons (including leaders and teachers).